Few papers have been published that describe how authors go about writing book reviews. This article provides an account of the procedures used to write one specific book review. Examples are given to illustrate what is basically a three-stage procedure: making notes; creating a rough draft; and polishing the final version. Some comments on the language of book reviews are included.

A recent British national intelligence-based Assessment (2002) illustrates how one government agency communicated science to serve its policy goals. This article analyzes some of the values that drive science, public policy, and national intelligence, and traces how those values affected the Assessment writers' goals and communication strategies. Through close reading of the Assessment's foreword and first section, this study shows how the writers shaped scientific and technical information to satisfy their disciplines' values and to naturalize their “proper perspective” on the policy case. Further analysis of similar documents will extend current research on scientific rhetoric, multidisciplinary collaborative writing, and public communication.

Previous research has indicated that engineering faculty do not follow best practices when commenting on students' technical writing. However, it is unclear whether the faculty prefer to comment in these ineffective ways, or whether they prefer more effective practices but simply do not enact them. This study adapts a well known study of response in composition to ask whether engineering faculty prefer authoritative, form-focused comments, or whether they may prefer to write different sorts of comments. We asked ten civil engineering faculty to comment on a sample paper and then rank their preferences for provided versions of comments on the same paper. One provided version emphasized comments on content, one emphasized comments on form, and one was balanced. Comparisons of the respondents' preferences and practices suggest that the engineering faculty recognize and value content-focused, non-authoritative responses, but generally do not write comments that conform to these values. We consider the implication of these findings for research on response to technical writing as well as for technical writing faculty in their own course. While recognizing the need for more research, we also discuss ways in which writing professionals, including WAC administrators and technical writing professors, can encourage engineering faculty to enact their preferences for response styles that reflect best practices.

In my 1992 College English article “The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust” [1], I looked at the implications of a Nazi memo whose sole purpose was to improve the efficiency of the gassing vans, in order to begin to try to understand and discuss the negative uses and ethical abuses to which technical communication, and deliberative rhetoric generally, could be taken by the powerful and unscrupulous. In “Questioning the Motives of Technical Communication and Rhetoric: Steven Katz's ‘Ethic of Expediency’” [2], Patrick Moore accuses me of ignoring alternate translations, citing out of context, and focusing on the negative meaning of words to make my case. The point at issue in these charges, I believe, is whether (and to what degree) Aristotle meant to base deliberative discourse on “expediency.” I will take each of these charges up one at a time to explore them more thoroughly, discuss their interrelations, and then conclude with a few observations of my own.

Talking on the phone is usually a private activity, but it becomes a public activity when using a cellphone in certain spaces. Unlike a traditional payphone in public, cellphones do not have privacy booths. Therefore, the ways in which people respond to cellphone calls in public spaces provide markers for social topographical space. In this study I explore how cellphone users negotiate privacy when using cellphones in public space and how those within the proximity of the caller negotiate space in response to these callers. Based on a year-long study involving observation fieldwork and in-depth interviews, I discuss the flexibility with which people constantly negotiate their private and public sense of self when using and responding to cellphones in public spaces.

This article critiques some titles in journal articles for being misleading and it argues that titles need to be informative. Examples are given of work on measuring the effectiveness of titles in two areas—sentence structure and reader comprehension—and the article concludes with brief comments on the effectiveness of book titles.

Few concepts in the social sciences have wielded more discriminatory power over the status of knowledge claims than that of statistical significance. Currently operationalized as a = 0.05, statistical significance frequently separates publishable from nonpublishable research, renewable from nonrenewable grants, and, in the eyes of many, experimental success from failure. If literacy is envisioned as a sort of competence in a set of social and intellectual practices, then scientific literacy must encompass the realization that this cardinal arbiter of social scientific knowledge was not born out of an immanent logic of mathematics but socially constructed and reconstructed in response to sociohistoric conditions.